This is the thread where we talk about Slavoj Zizek...

and that they prob overrate angel

as a boyfriend not a showt

show

i did my high school honors english thesis on woody allen, dostoevsky, and existentialism. it was decadent as fuck.

I.E. people working in the arts at post-grad level for whom formalist/structuralist/deconstructionist theory, and its associated language, really has decomposed down into academic jargon, devoid of that energy you see in 'the good old days' when Propp and Shlovsky were analysing the patterns found in folk tales, and it was radical, or when Barthes was looking at photography and saying look, there's structures here, or when later people were like let's break up those structures.

They make various nominally 'left-wing' critiques of cultural items by rote. 300 is a bit racist. No shit. Greek statues are generally not of wheelchair users. Actually, Madame Bovary is a bourgeois novel. No shit.

Fuck.

Catherine Belsey's horrible book Critical Practice, which I was forced to read, pretty much epitomises this, treating literary criticism as like a very, very tedious 9-5 job, heckling Leavis and Empson as if she were someone in charge of the bananas in Costcutter, who thought the previous managers hadn't done a good job of arranging the point of sale displays, and loved to indulge in posthumous nitpicking of their ways. Whilst presuming to marshal you around the banana area, instructing you in how to sell bananas, even though you didn't actually work there and had just wandered in.

People who you can't even say are bludgeoning into the arts and treating them as a sub-project of their grand politcal idea, because they have no such idea.

i guess these are the ppl we can blame for encouraging everyone to call things 'problematic.'

i think demonizing mediocre humanities academics is problematic. they are at worst a symptom of some other, larger problem... there is clearly a craving in our culture for critical/oppositional writing from a "leftist" perspective but no real political project available for these people to support. i think most people who get sucked into the rabbit hole of humanities academia are well-intentioned to start off with -- if often untalented -- there just isn't a productive outlet for their dissatisfaction.

also it's not like they are part of the landed gentry or even bourgeois really. most of these people are getting kicked around from adjunct job to adjunct job and barely pulling down enough money to support themselves.

lol 'problematic' r u 4 real?

that was a joke. i thought it would be funny to use "problematic" after JD just complained about its overuse.

let's unpack this

part of the issue, i tend to think, is that we have a set of "critical practices" (some of which are very powerful and useful when applied to particular ends or effects which are carefully considered) that are very often relics of an emancipatory critical tradition which imbues them with a sense of importance they can no longer legitimately claim. at the same time, we have these tools and nowhere really to direct them except at the terrarium of a novel or tv show or whatever--essentially limited universes which can be mastered by the theoretical observer.

the implication is that if we can discern the workings of hegemony in a novel then we are one step closer to exposing it in society at large--but the result of this idea is that we've developed ever more specific practices for reading novels and not a lot of ways to achieve that larger project. it's not that these practices are useless it's that they are projects of their environment (reading and writing about literary texts) and they are not always the tools needed for, say, an analysis of racism in society at large. as i said before, it's at best an indirect relationship. the problem, in other words, is that critical practices are not general means of achieving something like "comprehending the historical movement of a whole" but in fact highly situational and pragmatic devices or tools to be used for specified ends.

oh lol I missed his post but still big virtue of zizek imo is that he isn't doing these boring identity studies critiques

the ruling class in russia, w the arguable exception of the 'bourgeois specialists' maintained for their technical expertise, was liquidated (excellent soviet euphemism) or sent into exile. there was a NEW ruling class, yes, that eventually came to resemble the old one, but it wasn't the same as the old one.

― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour)

yeah, that was my point. if you're looking to overthrow capitalist tyranny under the rule of a plutocracy, then replacing it with authoritarian tyranny under the rule of an elite must be considered a complete failure. the real problem, the oppression of the proletariat, has not been solved or even addressed.

also, the attempts upthread to isolate academics from the ruling classes seem somewhat bizarre in this (marxist) context. intellectuals are the shoeshine boys of the ruling elite. you don't have to be a fatcat banker or hereditary royalty to be part of the system that oppresses those who perform the profit-generating labor. the petit bourgeoisie may include a lot of people, but surely not those who spin inscrutable fancies for the amusement only of other ivory tower academics, a "labor" that produces no profit of any kind. these are court jesters, a superfluous product of capitalist excess. their activities are either subsidized by the wealthy or paid from public coffers. though their salary comes from similar places, K-12 schoolteachers have a much better claim to separation.

^ trying out my fox news persona

haven't read every single post in past few days here but i do think geography matters here. guys like zizek are coming out of a european context where intellectuals get to stand on much more elevated soap-boxes than their us counterparts. sartre is long gone, but the notion of the "public intellectual" isn't, along with its expectations of commitment and Resistance. us academics may have their feet on american soil, but their heads are swimming in europe, so they tilt at windmills as though their tilts would be published in the morning's Le Monde..... except they won't.

this thread's been going twelve years and i've only read about 50 pages of zizek

tough guy

a useful marxism, one defined by action as much as theory, arising from and directed to the working classes - such a movement would probably attract upper & middle class followers

trotsky

the petit bourgeoisie may include a lot of people, but surely not those who spin inscrutable fancies for the amusement only of other ivory tower academics, a "labor" that produces no profit of any kind.

see, i'd argue that it's precisely this "closure" that allows new modes of thinking or criticism to slip through. in fact i think it's only through the autonomy which seems at times frivolous (even "useless") which allows academic writing to do anything which doesn't shine the shoes of the ruling class. that "excess" is the point and the great potential of this stuff, but by that very "excess" it can be misdirected (or not directed at all). it's what you use it for.

i mean, who gets to define terms like "useless" or "excess" or "profit" anyway, hmmm?? *winks and returns to reading Ecrits*

otm.

although i can't really blame people struggling to make it in this brutal society being bitter toward the argument that academics shouldn't have to prove their work is valuable in order to continue getting paid for it.

well it goes without saying (i hope) that academics should be just as open to criticism as anyone else.

as an academic who is heavily theory-centered, i can testify that doing this sort of thing can create a whiplash from "this is totally pointless nonsense" to "this is basically the most important way i could spend my time"--and i imagine that vacillation is similar for a lot of similar occupations (art, for one)--though maybe to less extreme degrees.

also i feel compelled to point out that as i was typing that the mailman just dropped off my new copy of Ecrits!

and if it makes anyone feel better, i would wager there's only a very small (and shrinking) number of people who make any real money doing this sort of thing. if you want to find the shoeshiners of the ruling elite i suggest the English department isn't where you should focus your attention.

academics are slightly more immmune to capital's constant demand to PRODUCE than most people are and that's why people get pissed off with them. in america you need to justify your existence by your usefulness to capitalism and if you can't do this you can end up homeless or in prison etc.

the problem is that anyone is subject to that brutal logic. at this point in history, most of the labor that people are doing is not socially necessary and often actively destructive. things could be sorted out differently, so that people could have work that is both more socially useful and personally fulfilling and the ability to pursue intellectual or artistic projects won't be seen as the mere province of the elites.*

*i do not know exactly how this would work, obviously. but i consider myself a "leftist" insofar as i believe in the possibility of a society that makes better use of people's talents.

what is that adorno said? that he believed every person is capable of things that, in bourgeois society, would be considered genius. i believe this. what is obscene about capitalism is that it wastes people.

still linkable after all these years

i fucking love that essay

see, i'd argue that it's precisely this "closure" that allows new modes of thinking or criticism to slip through. in fact i think it's only through the autonomy which seems at times frivolous (even "useless") which allows academic writing to do anything which doesn't shine the shoes of the ruling class. that "excess" is the point and the great potential of this stuff, but by that very "excess" it can be misdirected (or not directed at all). it's what you use it for.

― ryan, Saturday, July 27, 2013 9:03 AM (2 hours ago)

of course. this is why pop celebrities are such a vitally important component of the cause. ;)

christ i don't know what i was going on about here yesterday. i'm not the working class warrior i portrayed myself to be - my family's old-school upper middle class and i grew up around that shit, just had hard luck with deadbeat parents. guess i was being immature.

thinking about it a little more, my issue with ppl like zizek and other academics isn't necessarily with them, it's that there aren't any effective voices or activists on the left in the US, and it's hard watching the direction things are going in. but that's hardly the fault of academia and it's followers. and my issue with them is because an ex-girlfriend was a lefty academic. i'm a nut.

fwiw i liked your perspective, even if i'd want to complicate it just a bit (maybe in my own defense). i think lots of leftist academia is very vulnerable to what you were saying.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/07/beware-celebrity-academia.html

be wary of people who say classic texts are difficult to summarize. but read lots of textbooks. check.

something about this exact kind of poindexter makes me wonder if maybe i shouldn't become an authoritarian

"In fact, it is hard to do better than just sitting in a university bookstore and just reading all the intro texts they have. I spent many days in the Stanford bookstore doing just that. Once you are done with textbooks, review articles are the next most robust option."

confirms precisely how obnoxious these ppl are in my mind. cf rationalism AI cultist creeps

in the future all ideas will be bite sized.

order your education off the dollar menu

i mean that sort of advice can only come from someone who hasn't ever actually understood anything ever

depends on the field, obv in humanities there`s a good reason for focus on primary & secondary texts but in anything technical u can get really far without looking at anything other than textbooks. but yeah

Have any of you here seen this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhAMgVFKokk

I've not read anything by Zizek but watching him in that video doesn't inspire me to read any of his books.

I'm willing to try, though. What book would you guys recommend?

the sublime object of ideology

"Contingency, Hegemony, Universality" is good as well i think--and you get Butler and Laclau in the bargain.

There's a gaping hole in Chomsky's argument against Zizek, which is: there sits Chomsky, providing us with vast amounts of empirical data as to why this or that US foreign policy is disastrous, why this commonly-held belief about history is false, why austerity is disastrous, and so on. There it is, it is all true, capitalism is terrible, Chomsky has diligently done all this research, and there it all is, to watch, read, and listen to.

And no-one gives a fuck.

as if zizek is doing anything other than preaching to the star struck converted. give me a fucking break. chomsky has a reductive understanding of historical change and causality but at least it's a coherent (if often conspicuously one-sided) set of ideas. zizek's "politics" are little but a projection of his own chauvinism/narcissism.

never not worthwhile to read ppl arguing abt chomsky vs zizek on the internet

depends on the field, obv in humanities there`s a good reason for focus on primary & secondary texts but in anything technical u can get really far without looking at anything other than textbooks. but yeah

― flopson, Sunday, July 28, 2013 3:36 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh, if you want to understand technical things at all well, there are textbooks written by the people who also wrote the papers. they tend to be good, often contain new material themselves, and be well regarded as works in the field in their own right. often they are assigned to grad courses. then there are lots of terrible textbooks written by other people, and those are mainly not going to be very good, and they will teach you things that aren't true, often. those are more the "intro texts" that i imagine the author is speaking of. after reading those you can sometimes pretend you know things, but only in the company of people who don't know things themselves. the problem is they don't want to tell you a vision of a field of study, they just want to tell you what you need to pass the course.

zizek's "politics" are little but a projection of his own chauvinism/narcissism.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Sunday, July 28, 2013 5:28 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is obv not true, but whatever.

you're precisely the sort of scatterbrained cult studies dipshit who would love zizek, sterling

still a name droppin fool after all these years

(but that puts you in good company i guess)